


the ghost in you

by buckgaybarnes



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Kaiju, Ghost Hermann, Ghosts, Halloween, Haunted Houses, M/M, Past Character Death, but they kiss?, this one is. well. it's a little sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-05 21:55:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21215672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckgaybarnes/pseuds/buckgaybarnes
Summary: Newt decides to pick up another PhD in the completely legitimate field of parapsychology. What better way to prove the existence of ghosts than spending Halloween night in the old Gottlieb house?





	the ghost in you

**Author's Note:**

> this was originally supposed to be a tiny little ficlet on tumblr, but i had like a shit ton of time at work today it got very much away from me, LMAO. anyway happy halloween! enjoy! very original title!

All things considered, this isn’t the weirdest way Newt’s spent a Halloween night before. It’s not even the most illegal way. He’s had his fair share of underage drinking in shitty basements, egging big houses whose rich owners shut their lights off to avoid giving out candy, even—on one memorable occasion—breaking into a cemetery and getting to third base with a guy dressed as a zombie pirate. (They had to run from the night watchman and Newt tore his pants in half hopping over the big gate at the entrance, but it was totally fucking worth it.)

The illegality and the weirdness actually serve a great big _ point _this time.

Newt’s sixth PhD, he’s decided, is going to be in the completely legitimate and not at all pseudoscientific parapsychology, a decision he made while entirely in his right mind and not at all after watching both _Ghostbusters_ movies back-to-back on a rainy Saturday this past June. MIT was all too happy to give him the approval; after his first three PhDs, they just sort of handed him a _ pass go and collect $200 _ (or really, in this case, more like $50,000) card to do whatever the fuck he pleases, provided he can produce enough tangible research to defend a thesis. It’s how he got his fifth in cryptozoology. Besides. Newt thinks they kind of like being able to point to him as their golden child who’s so advanced he creates his _ own disciplines _when he runs out of other ones.

He needs research, is the point. Hands-on research. No more secondhand accounts of possessed dolls and creaking floorboards passed on from quote-unquote ghost hunters, no more exaggerated legends grounded in about twenty percent fact from local ghost tour guides who just want a nice tip. Newt needs to collect solid _ data_. What better way to do that than to go spend the spookiest night of the year in a real, actual, haunted house?

“You’re going _ alone_?” Tendo—a computer science PhD student, and Newt’s next to only friend—says when Newt calls him up to explain he’ll be missing his annual Halloween shindig. And it’s no small sacrifice to miss that shindig, either: Tendo gets the goddamn _ good _candy and spends days in advance making the most complex concoctions of flavored vodka and Jell-O in brain molds that Newt typically attacks with a spoon the second he gets there.

“I wasn’t planning on it, man,” Newt sighs. “I was hoping I could bring a whole team or something. Like I’m the fucking Ghost Adventurers.”

Newt’s been putting up fliers with his phone number all over MIT since September. (_Interested in the paranormal? Have nothing to do on Halloween? Want to make $50?_) When October rolled around, and there were still no takers (but plenty of anonymous text messages calling him inventive insults) he graduated to posting on Facebook in Boston-based paranormal societies. After that it was Craigslist. (_29__M seeking paid team to investigate haunted house Halloween night. Free pizza. Do NOT contact me with unsolicited services or offers.)_

Still nothing. At least Newt was able to rent some equipment for cheap off another guy on Craigslist. “It’s that ancient house near one of the historic parts of town,” he offers. “The old Gottlieb place.” His choice in haunted house was very deliberate: everyone knew the old Gottlieb place was haunted. It was just basic fact. Newt had always been too chicken to investigate it when he was a kid, even when he was dared to, but now, as a grown-ass man, he's determined. “Did you know it’s been _ abandoned _for over—?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tendo says. “Just don’t break your neck.” He pauses. “Or get arrested.”

“—over a hundred years,” Newt finishes. “Trust me. No one’s gonna care if I take a few pictures and scan for EVP. Kids break in there, like, all the time to get high and throw beer bottles at shit.” So what if there was a minor incident eleven years ago where a staircase gave away under some teenager and he spent six months in a coma? Or if, back in the eighties, a couple went missing in the basement? Or if in the thirties—well. “I’ll be fine,” Newt says. He’s been on deep sea diving expeditions. He spent a month aboard a boat in the middle of the ocean studying poisonous jellyfish. “I can handle a haunted house.”

He packs a bulging duffel bag to bring along with another duffel bag of his ghost-hunting equipment, with just essentials: a blanket, a spare sweatshirt, two Fluff sandwiches, a dozen cans of Monster energy drinks, a bag of Halloween candy, a flashlight, a portable charger, and his laptop (queued up with a handful of old creature features to pass the time). It’s a pain in the ass to carry it all on the T, and it’s even more of a pain in the ass when he hikes from the closest stop to the old Gottlieb place, and by the time he finally makes it to the rusty old front gates he’s worked up an impressive sweat despite the chilly air. The sun’s also set by that point; the streets have cleared out. He's alone.

“Atmospheric,” Newt says under his breath.

The old Gottlieb house stands silhouetted, equally alone, against the twilight, wind rustling the branches of the few barren trees on its overgrown lawn and sending dead leaves swirling by Newt’s feet. Half the windows are completely shattered. The roof has caved in in one spot. The chimney has all but crumbled away. The gate is badly rusted and padlocked shut. Newt supposes that—at one point—the house could’ve been stately, or beautiful, even, with its garden, its tall wooden pillars, its elegant windows. Even the wrought-iron fence.

Now, it’s just creepy.

“You know that place is haunted, right?” someone to Newt’s right suddenly says.

“_Shit_,” Newt says, and jumps about a foot in the air.

Then flushes with embarrassment: it’s just a kid. A small gaggle of kids, actually, toting small plastic pumpkin heads stuffed with candy and staring up at him like he’s a nut. (Because Newt probably is a nut.) The one who spoke is dressed up like a fairy. “Sorry,” Newt says. “Uh, I meant _ shoot_. You shouldn’t curse, kids. It's...bad.”

“It’s haunted,” the fairy repeats, not giving a shit about Newt’s little morality lesson. She crosses her arms. “Everyone at school says so.”

“I know,” Newt says. “That’s why I’m here.” He puffs out his chest with pride. “I’m looking for _ ghosts_.” When that doesn’t get the response he was hoping for—no gasps, no wide eyes, no exclamations of excitement or fear—but a few snickers instead, he deflates a little. He doesn’t need to be _ bullied _by a bunch of goddamn kids. His middleschool days are way behind him. “Where are your parents, anyway?”

“I’m twelve,” the fairy says.

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?” Newt says. “Go on, get out of here. Go throw eggs at rich people or something.”

They don’t budge. “Fine,” Newt says.

He tosses both of his bags over the tall fence with small thumps to the dead grass below, then hoists himself up halfway. “Don’t do this, either,” he says, and follows his bags over. His hoodie only gets caught and tears a _ little _ bit on one of the old spikes—so he’s quickly glad he brought the spare—and he lands a _ lot _more heavily than he anticipated, and stumbles backwards onto his ass. He’s getting too old for breaking and entering.

The massive front doors of the Gottlieb house swing open easily with the smallest push, and Newt isn’t surprised to find that the inside is just as fucking creepy. Peeling wallpaper. Old, smashed-up furniture. The caved-in staircase that put that teenager in a coma. No graffiti, though, which is surprising—Newt expected at least _ some_. Maybe a dick spraypainted here and there. The place is old, after all. He clicks his voice recorder on. “October 31st, 2019,” he says into it, “just before seven p.m. I’m now entering the Gottlieb house. I'll set up camp in the old parlor and go from there.”

_Set up camp _makes it all sound a lot more official than it actually is. Newt lays out his blanket on an old chaise lounge (the only piece of furniture he can find which can take his weight), and powers up his measly collection of rented equipment: a single night vision camera, his EVP recorder, some cannibalized handheld radio that _ supposedly _picks up EMF. It’s all very Ghost Hunters. He takes the camera and recorders with him as he does a sweep of the ground floor (absolutely nothing), inches up the dusty back staircase—since the one in the entrance hallway is out of commission—in the butler’s pantry to explore the second floor (still nothing), then finally collects his balls and slips down into the damp, mildewy, pitch-black basement. Nothing. Not even a goddamn rat. Even the furniture on each floor is sparse, especially upstairs; only two of the bedrooms hold actual bedframes, and one study contains nothing but the remnants of a gramophone and a decaying bookcase. “The night is young,” Newt sighs into his recorder at the end of his report. “Hopefully something will happen by morning, or I'm labeling this an official scientific bust.”

He switches the recorder off, kicks his boots up on the end of the chaise, and sticks his hand into his bag of Halloween candy. Nothing to do but wait. And maybe watch _ Earth vs. The Flying Saucers. _

He’s unwrapping his fifteenth Kit-Kat and well into his second movie (_House on Haunted Hill_) when he hears it: footsteps creaking above his head. Then, strange, slow, old music, nothing like he's ever heard before, as if it’s being played on a gramophone that hasn’t been dusted in fifty years. A gramophone—Newt realizes with a sudden chill—like the one he passed by earlier in the old study upstairs. He snaps his laptop shut and fumbles for his gear. 

The legend of the old Gottlieb house (which Newt recalls now, as he climbs the dark and creaking butler’s staircase, one shaking hand holding out his camera, the other shaking hand holding out his flashlight) is this: years and years ago, some time in the later half of the 1800s, Dr. Lars Gottlieb, a prominent steam engineer, moved his family from London to a nice big house in Boston to accommodate his previously-overseas business dealings. Before England, the family originally hailed from a small town in the German countryside, though records are unclear on which, and consisted of husband, wife, and their four children, three boys and one girl, though records are also unclear on where each child fell in age order.

It _ is _clear, however, that only three of the four children managed to survive the brutal New England winters.

Dr. Hermann Gottlieb—a promising young physicist and astronomer—died in the Gottlieb house from tuberculosis in February of 1895. He was 30. The house has been empty ever since. He didn’t just leave behind some truly _ sick _ innovative research, either (research that Newt’s dredged up from the bowels of the local library and pored over endlessly, research that'd be considered innovative even by _today's _standards), because he didn’t technically leave _ anything _ behind. Dr. Hermann Gottlieb never left.

“Dr. Gottlieb?” Newt calls, squeakily, down the upstairs hallway. He tries again a little louder. “Dr. Gottlieb?”

Almost as if in response, the music halts. “No, no, _ shit,_” Newt hisses, and he scurries over to pause just outside the study door. Goosebumps prickle along his skin. He’s _ sure _there’s someone on the other side.

Hermann Gottlieb has been (_allegedly_) haunting the old Gottlieb house since Lars packed up his family and returned to the Old-Old Country hardly a year after Hermann bit the dust. Reports of Hermann’s spirit all basically follow the same pattern: music drifting from upstairs. The smell of pipe tobacco. The clack of a cane down deserted hallways. Equations appearing in chalk on the wall-sized blackboard in his old study. The study Newt's standing outside of right now.

Newt takes a deep breath. He pushes the door open.

It's as if the room’s been completely transformed. Shit—it looks _ livable_. The fireplace is lit, the gramophone is gleaming, the bookcase is overflowing, and—the blackboard—the blackboard—

“Hermann Gottlieb?” Newt says.

Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, deceased at age 30, looks exactly like his grainy old photographs Newt found in newspaper clippings alongside his old physics journal articles in person, if not significantly more _ translucent. _ Dark hair, cut severely, a wide, thin mouth, dark eyes, dark eyelashes, too-pale skin, a slight slouch to his shoulders. His clothing looks dated even for his own time period. He has a round pair of eyeglasses perched at the end of his nose. Clenched in one hand is an ornate cane; in the other is a piece of chalk. He looks—well. He looks kinda _cute._

He scowls when he catches sight of Newt, and to Newt’s mortification, it doesn’t make him any less attractive. Maybe even _ more_. “What do _ you _want?” he says.

He can talk, too. “Uh,” Newt says. He almost drops his camera, the night vision mode of which—he now realizes—is pretty unnecessary for catching ghosts. Apparently they just fucking waltz around here. “Uh. Okay. Wow. Dude. You’re a ghost.”

“Yes,” Hermann says.

“Like, you’re dead,” Newt says.

“Obviously,” Hermann says.

Newt has a million questions, all of which clamor now on the tip of his tongue, and he wants to ask if dying hurt, if he remembers dying, how he’s even possible. “You’re _ gorgeous_,” is all he blurts out.

He means it in the sense that Hermann is his specimen of choice tonight, and Newt thinks all his specimens are gorgeous. Newt showers the same compliment on bits of fungus under his microscope and small poisonous frogs who try to spit venom at his eyes. Hermann’s sheer fact of existence is gorgeous. His conquering of the natural order of life—whether intentional or not—is gorgeous. Hermann’s soft eyes and delicate wrists and fine cheekbones are gorgeous. 

Like, fine—Newt will admit he was a little _too_ interested in the scholar who walks the halls of the Gottlieb house, for reasons beyond _ this is very scientifically stimulating_, and it didn't exactly come as _too _much of a surprise to him that Hermann was kinda cute. He read every single inch of Hermann’s surviving research. He paid for a subscription to a Victorian studies journal to obtain access to reprints of his published research. He lingered too long over the photographs of him. Too long over a small handful of love letters Hermann’d exchanged with another man, unnamed, in the summer of 1886, tucked into the very back of the local library’s Gottlieb scrapbook. Hermann was handsome; Hermann was intelligent; Hermann was eloquent, and passionate, and romantic. Can you really blame Newt for harboring a weird trans-century celebrity crush on the guy?

This was obviously not what Hermann had been expecting to hear. His scowl fades; he blinks, owlishly, at Newt, round glasses glinting in the firelight. “I beg your pardon?”

“Speaking as,” Newt stammers, “as a scientist. You’re—I’m not calling you attractive. You are, but that’s not the point.” He strides forward and thrusts out his hand. “I’m Dr. Newton Geiszler, but you should call me Newt. Everyone does. I’m working on a PhD in parapsychology.”

“In _ what_?” Hermann says.

“Like—Ghostbusters,” Newt says, lamely. “Uh. After your time. I'm studying ghosts.”

Hermann sizes him up, from his grimy docs, to his skinny jeans, to his ripped New England Aquarium hoodie, and Newt feels uncomfortably like _ he’s _ the specimen here. (Hermann could be dangerous, a small voice in the back of Newt’s head reminds him too late. The teenager on the staircase. The couple in the basement. Maybe he _ should’ve _brought a team.) “You’re not running away,” Hermann finally declares. “Usually they run away. You’re either very brave or very foolish.”

“_Very brave or very foolish _ is my middle name,” Newt says, and cracks a high-pitched laugh. Hermann’s face remains impassive.

“That’s a terrible middle name,” he says, and sniffs. “I must say—those _ modern _naming sensibilities—”

“It’s not,” Newt sighs. “I was kidding. It’s a joke. That’s not actually—”

Then: the smallest hint of a smile at Hermann’s twitching lips, at the crinkling corners of his eyes. “I _ know, _Dr. Geiszler. They had invented comedy by my time.”

“Oh,” Newt says. 

He watches Hermann cross the room and settle himself down, without a sound, on a small threadbare armchair angled towards the fireplace. Like the rest of the room, it’s been restored to its former state of—well—not _ life_, but its appearance when those around it were living. And isn’t that something? Hermann’s ghostly influence must be strong if he can do all that to a whole room. Newt’s itching to take some notes. “So you’re studying ghosts,” Hermann says. He suddenly narrows his eyes. “You’re not one of those rubbish spiritualists, are you? The sort with the trick candles and wires and—”

“No _ way_, dude,” Newt says. He shakes his camera as proof, though it occurs to him someone from the 19th century would have no fucking clue what that is, so it was a pretty pointless move. “I’m the real deal. I’m going to prove there’s life beyond—well—life. I guess it’ll completely negate my _ other _PhD in biology, since the life cycle was kind of a big deal for us there, but—that's not important. Can I ask you some questions? About being a ghost? I promise it won’t take too long. Unless you disappear at midnight or something. Do you?”

Hermann stares at him. Newt takes a deep breath. “Can I ask you some questions?” he says. “For my research.”

Hermann mutters something about hacks and trick wires again and turns his gaze to the fireplace, but he waves Newt on.

“Sweet,” Newt says. He has a pretty good feeling his voice recorder won’t pick up anything Hermann says, and those stupid EVP recorders seem to only produce garbled static, but he turns both on anyway, sets up the camera on its extendable tripod,_ and _whips out his notebook to do this the old-fashioned way. “I gotta say, I wasn’t really expecting this, so I don’t, uh, have any questions planned.” Hermann doesn’t look at him. “Right.” He knows Hermann knows he’s dead, and he knows that his current state of being is decidedly more supernatural than it was before, so he quickly scrawls that down. “So. What’s it like being a ghost?”

“Monotonous,” Hermann says. “Endlessly so.”

“Really?” Newt says, lowering his notebook. “I thought it could be kinda...I don’t know. Fun. You can walk through walls and scare the shit out of people. Float around. Live forever.”

Hermann drags his eyes from the fireplace. The look he gives Newt is cold. “I spend every day exactly as the last,” he says. “I walk the halls. I smoke my pipe. I listen to the same bloody record. I work on my research. The _ same _research, in fact, I was working on when I died, though I never get any closer to a solution. I don’t believe I ever will. Does that sound fun, Dr. Geiszler?”

Newt coughs. He sincerely hopes he isn’t about to be flung out the window or down the back staircase or something. Hermann doesn't seem to be about to resort to violence, though, so he pushes on. “So you—you remember dying?”

“Consumption,” Hermann says. “It claimed...many. I was one of the unlucky. One too many autumn strolls, perhaps, one too many nights spent late at my studies.” He points to a small door, nestled between a window (the glass intact, the great maroon drapes drawn over half of it) and the bookcase. Newt hadn't seen it in his original investigation. “My bed chamber—where I lived out the last few months of my life. I did not want to go to a sanatorium.”

Half of Newt wants to look inside. The other half doesn't—out of fear, or maybe just out of a strange respect for Hermann. He doesn’t know if he’d like someone poking around where he died. “What was it like?” he says instead. “What did you see? When did you _know_?” Hermann is silent. Newt stomps his boot on the ground (which creaks dangerously) in frustration. “Come on, Hermann! You’re literally the only ghost I’ve ever met! Give me something!”

Another scowl, though Hermann’s eyes soften strangely when Newt uses his name. “When I woke up _ after_,” he says, “they’d already cleared out my papers and locked off my wing from the rest of the house. It didn’t take too long to comprehend what had happened. And—well, it infuriated me. I was young. My work would go forever unfinished.” He raps his fingers on the wooden armrest of his chair. He swallows a few times. “My family fled before the year was out. I suspected they could hear me clattering and raging about, and it terrified them. No one ever came back.”

Newt copies this down, too, though he knew most of that already. Hermann was furious over his death; furious enough to unintentionally drive away his family; furious enough to hurt obnoxious trespassers who come barging through his house? “Did you hurt that teenager who came in a decade back?” Newt says. “There was a staircase—”

“Why would I do _ that_?” Hermann says. “That was his own fault. This whole damned house is falling apart—he should’ve known better than to go gallivanting through. No, that was not me.”

“And before,” Newt says, feeling mildly chastened, “there was a couple, in the basement—they were never seen again.”

“I’m sure I don’t know anything about that_, either_,” Hermann says, and gives a snort. “Really, Newton—my afterlife may be dull, but I have much better ways to spend it that don’t involve seeking vengeance on the living. Perhaps they eloped. Perhaps they locked themselves in a closet somewhere by mistake. Perhaps it’s a _ myth _meant to scare gullible fanatics like you.”

Hermann insulted him, and Newt knows he should be offended, but... “You called me Newton,” Newt says, pencil slowing to a halt. His face feels warm. God, how fucking mortifying—the first guy that’s made Newt feel something in years, and he’s been _ dead _for a century. It figures.

“You called _ me _Hermann,” Hermann says.

“It’s just—” Newt smiles, a little nervously. “No one ever calls me that. I like it.”

The mood shifts at once: Hermann returns the smile. His eyes linger on Newt for a second time that evening, but Newt doesn’t get the sense that he—or his loudly _ modern _clothing—are being scrutinized. In the low light of the fire, Newt could almost call his gaze _erotic._ “Forgive me if I am being forward, Newton,” Hermann says, and Newt could swear the smallest bit of pink pricks those pale, translucent cheeks. “Only you called me attractive. Did you mean that?”

Newt nods.

“It’s been a while, since...” Hermann casts his eyes to the floor.

A true Victorian gentleman. It’s a shame, really, that Hermann wasn’t born a hundred years later. Maybe they would’ve known each other. Maybe they would've worked together. Maybe Newt would’ve read his research and seen a photograph of that moody, pointy face and fallen head-over-heels in love with a still-living version of him. Maybe _ Newt _could’ve been the recipient of Hermann’s tender love letters, and he could've written some of his own in return. “I date guys,” Newt offers. “I love dating guys. Men, I mean. Guys is—it’s new slang, it means men. And—dating means courting.”

“Ah,” Hermann says. 

Newt clicks off his voice recorder.

Hermann’s lips are ice-cold when Newt kisses them, almost like solidified mist (like if Newt kisses too hard he’ll fall right through to the ratty armchair below), and they part in a surprised gasp beneath Newt’s when Newt seizes the front of his tartan waistcoat and draws him closer. His brown eyes are wide when Newt pulls away; he presses two fingers to his mouth. “I’m sorry,” Newt gasps. He laughs and rubs at a spot below his glasses. “It’s just—I think I’m kind of in love with you. Is that weird?”

“You don’t even know me,” Hermann says, dazedly. He lifts his other hand like he wants to cup Newt’s cheek, but thinks better of it, and draws it away to drop to his side. “We’ve only just—”

Newt shakes his head. “I read your research. All of it. And your letters. You’re a _ genius_. You're the most interesting person I've ever met. You're—”

“_D__ead,_” Hermann reminds him.

And, yeah, Hermann's dead, that’s a little unfortunate, but they could work around it. Newt has no qualms about doing it with a ghost. It’d be _ great _ data, actually. Hell, give Newt a few years' worth of collected ghost-data, he could probably figure out how to zap Hermann back into an actual human body for a happy ever after. As if Hermann can sense where his mind is going, he stills Newt with that hand to his cheek after all. “It’s almost dawn,” he says; to Newt’s surprise, the light peeking from beyond the heavy curtains does seem to be getting incrementally grayer. Time must slip by faster in Hermann’s weird ghost bubble. “I’ll be gone soon. Will you come back again? You’re the first person who’s ever...”

“Shit, I’ll come back every single night,” Newt says, and then stops mid-sentence. _Until I die _is what he wanted to say, but he realizes that might be a little insensitive.

But Hermann nods anyway, evidently satisfied. “Thank you,” he says.

Newt stays with him until the ancient grandfather clock in the corner chimes a quarter after seven—the first time Newt’s heard it chime all night—and the cozy room fades away to rot and decay once more as the pink of the sunset breaches the horizon. Then (with a single press of Newt’s hand, and a small, melancholy smile) Hermann fades away, too.

“See ya,” Newt says to nobody.

When Newt goes back to review his video footage later (sitting cross-legged on his bed with his unfinished Halloween candy in his lap), he finds the video camera completely blank and its battery completely drained. His recorder has picked up no voice but his own, carrying on one-half of a conversation; Hermann’s responses come out in only an indistinguishable, buzzing static, like Newt expected. The handwritten notes are the only thing left intact.

He's not discouraged. Replicating results is crucial to forming accurate conclusions; he'll just have to go back tonight.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on twitter at hermanngaylieb, and tumblr at hermannsthumb


End file.
